Chinese leaders have set high expectations for a four-day policy meeting that opened in Beijing on Saturday and that is expected culminate with the assembled Communist Party notables endorsing a blueprint for reforming China’s economy in the coming years.

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Among the central questions facing Premier Li, President Xi Jinping and the rest of the leadership: Are they willing to dismantle entrenched interests that some economists and many other Chinese say are standing in the way of economic overhaul?

China’s hardly alone in having vested interests. Yet, given that the Communist Party controls large swaths of the economy as well as the government, the patronage networks that sustain interest groups are deeply embedded and the rewards can be rich. Many believe this connected web is at the heart of China’s endemic struggle with corruption and inefficiency in state-led sectors.

Some of the competition between interest groups is generic. Central government ministries fight for influence and funding; local governments are keen to protect industries at the heart of regional employment and growth; and state-owned enterprises resist measures that subject them to greater market competition.

The big state companies are seen as particularly powerful. Some of that clout is a holdover from the state-planned economy of the Mao era. These big enterprises act as proving grounds for the ambitious, who then go on to careers in the upper ranks of the party. Those ties have helped some companies resist environmental regulations or orders to stop spending on new production lines and real estate.

The detention earlier this year of current and former top executives at China National Petroleum Corp. was seen by some political commentators as a shot across the bow of all state enterprises to heed Beijing’s directives.

Leaders have signaled political reform isn’t in the cards at this plenum. A commentary in the party’s mouthpiece People’s Daily newspaper on Friday reiterated a frequent line by the government to resist those calling for western-style democracy in China.

But defeating vested interests in the system is impossible without enabling political reform, says Deng Yuwen, previously an editor at the party’s Study Times newspaper. He argued in a recent commentary that without greater transparency in China, vested interests would continue operating in the shadows, their backers and motives unknown to the public.

“The government must launch a set of laws and systems to regulate the development of interest groups,” Mr. Deng wrote earlier this year in a commentary on the Hexun.com website.

Some Chinese officials have long maintained that political reform would follow economic development. Now, some are wondering whether politics itself is one new hurdle to a much-needed economic overhaul.

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